“Car companies are finally realising that what they sell is just a big computer you sit in.”

So says Kevin Tighe, a senior systems engineer at security testing firm Bugcrowd according to this Guardian article, reporting from the “car-hacking village” at this year’s Defcon, the hacker conference.

It seems everybody’s doing self-driving cars nowadays, but Bloomberg reports that George Hotz is doing for the self-driving car what Biggles did for the Sopwith Camel – giving it the romance of seat-of-the-pants driving, and money-where-your-mouth-is glamour.

There’s a brilliant video clip about half-way through the article that explains absolutely everything (really). In essence, however, what you do is show the AI how you drive your car then, after a few hours, let it get on with it.

In its current incarnation, Autopilot seems a little overhyped. At the end of the day it’s just adaptive cruise control and lane keeping. Both features are something we’ve seen on other cars before, making Tesla’s Autopilot feel like another baby step toward automated driving rather than a revolution.